“How much was there?”
“Maybe a thousand. I really just glanced at it. She put it back in the satchel and said, ‘Suzanne, you can say no to money but I know you can’t say no to that.’ She nodded at this Caddy STS parked right next to me. It was black and beautiful. I remembered that joke I made to her the first time we talked and I thought me and my big mouth. ‘Drive it tonight,’ she said. ‘Go out and celebrate. You deserve to. It’s not stolen, it’s borrowed. Leave it with the Tower valet when you’re done with it and I’ll take care of the rest. I’ll make sure this pathetic heap gets back to your hotel.’ She called my Sentra a pathetic heap.”
“And what did you do?”
“Ruth, I thought about it. I loved the STS, I’ll confess to that. But I also saw that Allison really wanted me to take it. I wondered if it was just to make her more colorful, make her seem more like Robin Hood. If it was something she’d tell the press about, and exploit. I also believed that it was a borrowed car, because I figured if she’d stolen it, she’d be proud, right? But mainly, I felt that if I turned the car down she’d feel disrespected and then get angry. I thought of the gun. There was an underlying threat from the gun-at least in my mind. So I agreed to take the car.”
She grinds out the butt in the green ashtray, getting every last little ember.
“You were afraid to defy her?”
“Yes.”
“Afraid of the gun?”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“Why didn’t you report this to the police?”
“Later, I almost did. I had my cell phone in my hand to make the call. But Allison Murrieta hadn’t harmed me. In fact, she had rid me of a killer who was on my tail. She had allowed me to get back to my family and my job. I realized that with one call I could probably have the police staking out the Sunset Tower when she drove the Sentra back there. I couldn’t do that to her. At least, I didn’t. On some level I felt like I owed her something. On another, I was afraid of her. And I also… well, I wanted to touch her fame for a short time, to be a part of it. It’s been exhilarating for me.”
Ruth puts the ashtray back in her desk, dead butt and all. “Suzanne, are you telling me the truth?”
“Whole, and nothing but.”
“Would you be willing to testify on your own behalf, if this were to go to trial?”
“Yes.”
“Suzanne, I’ve seen elaborate alibis hold up under cross-examination, but not many.”
“The truth is easy to tell. I’ll stand by it, Ruth.”
Ruth nods, drops the pencil to the pad and sits back. “This won’t get that far, Suzanne. I’ve got an appointment with the DA in about an hour. I’ll outline for him what we talked about. I expect the charges to be dropped by the end of the workday.”
I sigh and look down.
“Do you want to bring a civil suit for wrongful arrest? You could win a pretty nice judgment for the damage to your reputation, the jail time, the usual inconvenience and stress. I’d demand a million dollars and you’d get maybe one-quarter of that.”
“No, thank you.”
“Good. Your decision not to press a civil case will be a large motivator for the DA to fold up and go home.”
“Yes.”
Ruth’s secretary came in just then, set a sheaf of papers in front of Ruth, smiled at me and walked back out.
“Here’s a contract, with a substantial fee adjustment because you’re a schoolteacher and I like you.”
“Thank you.”
“You won’t see the inside of a courtroom on this matter again.”
“I really do truly thank you.”
“Tell me about the deputy. Hood.”
I haven’t said one word to her about Hood. So I tell her. Basically the truth. Pretty much all of it. She listens without interrupting. She makes no notes. She looks down at her hands.
“I had a guy like that once,” says Ruth. “Forty years ago. Haven’t seen him since. I think of him often. I dream about him. In my dreams he’s never aged, and neither have I. I also love my husband.”
“I know the feeling.”
I see that Ruth is thinking about him. She comes out of it.
“Was he suspicious about the car?”
“I told him I rented it.”
Ruth eyes me in a way that makes me glad she’s on my side. Very glad.
“In your presence, did Allison wipe her fingerprints off the interior of your Sentra?”
This is a fastball but I pull it.
“Yes. She had a box of wet wipes in her satchel.”
“Good. Because the DA might try to get fancy on us, say all the prints in the Cadillac are yours.”
“Well, some of them are. And Hood’s.”
“If she wiped down the Sentra, then she would have wiped down the Caddy, too.”
“I would think.”
“So your prints are in both cars and hers are in neither.”
“I don’t know what she did in the Caddy.”
“No, how could you?”
38
I spend the rest of the day with my boys and Ernest, moving back into our home down in Valley Center. It’s blazing hot but the sky is clear and the air is clean and I feel a great relief spreading through me as I look out at my home and the barn and the big oak tree and the pond.
Bradley boards and Jordan fishes. I love the sound of the skateboard wheels on the wooden half pipe and I love the sight of Jordan out there trying to fool the crafty bass that live in the cattails near the pond’s south edge. Baby Kenny rides Ernest’s broad shoulders, his tiny hands clamped to his father’s ears.
The dogs bound around the property, re-pissing on things and fruitlessly chasing the rabbits and ground squirrels and bullfrogs.
Ernest is very quiet as always, but I can see the hurt in his face since I told him about the new arrangement here. It’ll be tough for a while. I don’t doubt for a second that Ernest will find suitable female company-he’s got the look and the talk when he needs it. I won’t let him brood. I’ve gotten to know some of the single women down here. They’re country craftsman types-horse people and farmers and makers of things-and they like Ernest’s broad-backed humility and good humor. I may try to nudge one or two his way. No matter what I’m doing with whom, I’m going to keep Ernest in my life and in Kenny’s life as much as Ernest wants to be. We need him. We need all the fathers we can get.
Bradley’s father, of course, cut out after I shot him. I’ve told him a thousand times that he’s welcome around here. He comes around now and then but he acts like a dog that’s been kicked too hard too often. His wife is bitterly ugly which pleases me. He is now a man almost completely devoid of everything I was once attracted to. He still has good teeth.
Sometimes it’s hard to understand why his son is a prince. Even at sixteen Bradley is wise, charming, articulate, acutely aware of others and the world around him, mentally incisive, athletically gifted, physically beautiful, flawlessly polite and agonizingly shy. He tested at 160 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test they gave him this year. The results embarrassed him. He’s pushing six feet tall already and still growing. They call him Radley on the varsity football team, where he started at wide receiver and safety last year as a sophomore. He hits extremely hard. His freshman English teacher called me to say he was the most talented writer she’d ever had, and you know how much I value the opinions of teachers. On the downside, he bores easily and has a genuine appetite for risk and danger. He has little if any sense of his own mortality. But with his black hair to his shoulders and his chocolate eyes and his silly goatee he looks like a god-in-training, a poet-warrior, a hero. I’ll take some of the credit for that but I think history is more responsible for Bradley than any of us are. Now I sound like my mom.